Monopoly 3 for Windows ~ Actually, I Like The Original Better...

Just to put this review and my stance in context, I'll tell you that we are total Monopoly freaks. We play every day, and we collect rare boards. We even gravitate to the Monopoly Slots in Atlantic City. Yeah, we're old and boring... sue me. What's been missing is a PC version that we can play on airplanes and in the hotel when we travel. Enter Monopoly 3.

Now, I had the original PC version over ten years ago and loved it, but could not for the life of me find that anymore... and I looked all over hell's creation for it. I finally had to go with the new and improved so lots more moolah version. Ugh. Still, I had hopes.

In case you live in a cave (and whatever would you be doing on a computer if that were the case?) I'll just touch on what Monopoly itself is. It's a board game in which you roll dice and move around with the intention of buying as many properties as possible. When you have a complete set of any color (a monopoly) then you can begin to improve those lots by building houses and hotels on them in order to charge your opponent higher rent when they have the misfortune to land on them. It can get very cut-throat, especially in my house.. heh.

But I'm going to assume you probably know all this, and if not then you can read the full set of rules here:
http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/

So now that you have the basics, how does this transfer to the current 3-D incarnation? Well, it does and it doesn't. I mean the basic rules are the same, and you can adjust those to your hearts content if you wish. Through the years folks have basterdized the basic rules and added such things like double pay if you land directly on Go, or getting a bonus for landing on Free Parking. Infogames recognizes these rules and lets you easily incorporate them into this PC version if you wish. The problem is, it doesn't remember them the next time you play. You have to change your settings every single time you load the game. Grrr Argh.

The tokens which move about the board are all animated and talk. The voices are clear but very limited. What I mean is, there isn't much variation in the things they say and you will grow tired of it and the horse whinnying after the first 15 minutes or so. Luckily, you can go back into the settings and turn those off... but again you'll have to do that every time you load the game.... There is also some innocuous background music playing during the game. I haven't gotten the least bit tired of that yet, in fact I hardly notice it any more.

The graphics are what annoy me the most. The 3-D part of the whole thing (you know, the part that supposedly made you rush out and upgrade to this from a perfectly good version) is that the board goes in and out and spins as the tokens move around. This makes me dizzy. In this mode the board is pretty crisp and clear though. You can turn that off so the board lays flat on your monitor where you can see the whole thing at once, but you can't actually see the whole thing at once in that mode. Clear as mud? Well, without the 3-D animation, things get really fuzzy. Seriously fuzzy. I mean to the point that it's even more annoying than the dizzying 3-D effect.

Now, I'm not playing this on an old system. In fact, if you want the system stats to compare, this is my machine:
E-Machines M5405 PC Notebook

As you can see, this is a new system and pretty up to date. The problem with the graphics definitely lies with the game itself.

If you still wish to play in spite of all that, you can play with other humans or create other computer opponents. If you play against the computer, you can assign levels to your opponents depending on hard you want them to be to deal with.

The controls are very straight forward. Pretty much point and click to roll the dice, then click to buy property, build, sell, mortgage, whatever. The learning curve is pretty much zilch if you know the basics of the board game and this one leads you through what your current choices are. If you really have not heard of Monopoly, then do read the instruction book and familiarize yourself. It looks a lot more complicated than it is. I'm thinkin' like about 30 minutes for a novice to get the hang of it, at the very most.

While I prefer to play the computer or Tom, you can also play over the Internet with other folks if you like. I've not had the desire to do that.

So... do I recommend this game? Well, since you can't find the less annoying first version anymore, then I have to say yeah, this is it, bud. If you wanna play Monopoly on your laptop then you have no choice but to go with this one... but I'm giving it 2 stars because previous versions were a lot better on the eyes and senses. Pity they felt the need to improve it....

Read my review of Monopoly Tycoon